Martin Cathcart Frödén won the 2015 Dundee International Book Prize with his debut novel Devil take the Hindmost (Freight). After 10 years in Glasgow, he’s recently moved back to his native Sweden to take up a
position as Lecturer in Creative Writing at Malmö University. Here he tells a story about love, ageing, emotions in flux, and ultimately a death interrupted. Without ruining the experience, the story hints at new
beginnings and allegiances beyond those put in place by blood. It explores the unsettling fact that beyond death and taxes, time and tide, entropy and poetry, there is very little of which we can be certain. Apart from, maybe, love.
‘Thanks for coming with me.’ He put a palm to his neck
and looked down on his elbow resting on the table.
‘No problem Inigo,’ I said.
‘The anniversary is difficult.’
I could only nod. He refilled his glass and stood up.
Shook his shoulders up and down like a nervous,
overweight boxer and looked at the ceiling.
‘I’ll go and get the Limoncello,’ he said and went out in
the corridor towards the lounge. I heard the front
door close. He sometimes preferred the company of
the pub across the road to me. Or maybe he kept a
bottle in the car.
An hour later he was back puffing even louder. I was
still at the table. I had finished the soup but not my
book. He tried to tell me about some argument he had
become involved in a long time ago, an anarchosyndicalist
memory dredged up and soon he was
punching empty space to emphasise certain words.
Italicizing the air. Making bold claims. With every jab
he spilled more wine on the floor and on his shirt.
Soon sweat he no longer wiped was forming along his
hairline and if I hadn’t known him I would have been
afraid, but now it was like watching rehearsals for a
play. He was either a genius actor or a terrible one,
because he was messing up his lines and forgetting his
movements. I had no idea what his main argument
was. Time maybe. Loss probably. Injustices small and
large.
He gestured for more drink and started walking over
to the table when he became rigid and let out a stifled
scream, clutching his chest. I once saw a tram run over
a fox. This sounded the same. The screeching tracks
and the trapped animal.
I flew up, whipping the wine bottle over in the
process, and caught him, my knees buckling with the
effort. I laid him on the chequered linoleum as gently
as I could. He was whispering that he was fine,
reassuring me he was just a little out of puff, that
there was no need to worry. I had to crouch down to
hear. The bottle was clucking out wine on the floor
beside us.
‘Shh, I’m calling an ambulance. Just stay still,’ I said.
‘No, no hospitals, no authorities. They’ll never let me
go once they’ve got me.’
‘Inigo, come on, we have to…’
‘Just put me to bed.’
‘But…’
‘Bed!’ A forced stage whisper. I looked at my phone on
the table.
‘It’s happened before,’ he said. ‘I know how to deal
with it.’
Against my better judgement I helped him to bed. He
told me to go and get my book. I tried to phone my
mum but couldn’t get hold of her. It had been almost a
month. I knew she was working, and I knew she might
be avoiding me, as I was her.
When I came back Inigo’s face was as white as a
Victorian bust. A caricature of male, idiotic, isolated
suffering. He was not sleeping, not entirely awake
either. Obviously, I couldn’t read so I just sat next to
his bed to hear his breathing. To be near if it stopped.
Every now and then a wave of pain came over him and
he would gasp and I would hold my breath until he let
out a sigh and resumed breathing. This went on and
on.
It had been a long month since I came home drunk and
sad and angry not just at her and dad but at absolutely
everything. I didn’t mean to do what I did, but neither
should she have lost it. It was just a window. The next
day I moved into a windowless boxroom in Inigo’s flat.
It was definitely a temporary thing.
Once his face relaxed and it seemed he was sleeping, I
phoned my mum again. This time she answered.
Before she could say anything, I told her I was sorry
about the whole fight thing, but that now wasn’t the
time to talk about it. Instead, I told her about Inigo.
When I saw a taxi pull up in front of the house, I
grabbed my jacket. I opened the door and went
upstairs to the next landing, leaving the front door
open. When I heard her going into the flat, I walked
downstairs and out.
She was in love with this Spaniard. And he with her I
could only presume. It was too much to think about. I
liked him, but wasn’t sure he was the best thing that
could happen to mum. Or me. But he had taken me to
his ex-wife’s grave and he was nice in a mad way. It
wasn’t up to me. He had a spare room, I paid under
market rent while I was looking for something else,
something not-my-mum’s place, and that was it. Him
and mum – I made sure to always be out when they
were in the flat, which to be fair wasn’t very often.
Once outside I was soon lost in the streets I should
have known, my mind going nowhere: a motor
misfiring. I had slept terribly in my new airless room
for weeks and now I was pacing around Chalk Farm
and Gospel Oak, waiting for something. Avoiding
everything.
Hours later the cold forced me back to the flat.
Coming into the kitchen I saw a note from Inigo
Thanks, I’m fine now! held in place on the kitchen
table by a bottle of undrinkable Ouzo. I walked around
the flat and was relieved to not find anyone sleeping.
Not on the sofa, not in my room. No one in his double
bed either.
I put the door chain on, in case Mum had a key. I had
to trust he was fine if he said he was. Sitting down on
the sofa, I sank into my earlobes. It had been a long
night.
I woke up to someone banging on the door. The sun
was high in the sky.
‘Peter, it’s me, Inigo. Let me in!’
‘What happened last night?’ I asked once he was in. He
was wearing a huge hat that was either incredibly
trendy or that he had found in a skip.
‘They wanted me to stay for tests, but that’s not who I
am,’ he said.
At the hospital?’ I asked and he nodded proudly.
I could almost see him, shrugging into his terrible
leather jacket, taking the cannula out and putting it in
a bin, humming The Internationale.
‘Does my mum know you’re here?’ I asked.
‘Not as such,’ he said. This time less proud.
He sat down in the lounge and put the hat beside him.
Then he asked me to shave his head. I declined of
course. He extracted a hair trimmer from his jacket
pocket. Got up, waving it around like a torch and
stalked off into the bathroom, leaving the door wide
open.
‘Will you help me or not?’ he shouted, his voice
reverberating off the tiles.
‘No.’
‘I can’t pay a hairdresser to do this. It would be an
insult.’
‘I can lend you the money if you’re short.’
‘Don’t be cheeky,’ came his voice. I didn’t know what
to do with my hands.
‘I’ll have to go back in there eventually, so I’d rather
do this myself. Get used to the feel,’ he said quietly. If
I hadn’t already been on my way to the bathroom, I
wouldn’t have heard him.
I ran the machine back and forward over his skull.
With eyes closed he was slowly emerging from grey
curtains. The big black mechanical rat, its tail reaching
up to the strange small shaver outlet I had never seen
anyone use, soon sated.
Turning off the shaver I took a step back to nod
approvingly, as if I knew what I was doing. Standing
back up and looking in the mirror, he ran a hand from
the back of his head to the front and smiled. He
walked away flexing his neck this way and that and
soon I could hear a bottle being opened in the kitchen.
Your mother is coming over in a bit,’ he shouted.
‘She’ll get the surprise of her life when she sees this.’
I checked the battery on the machine and got working
on my own head, and soon I was as bald as him, both
of us eggs in a basket.
‘No problem Inigo,’ I shouted back to him. ‘No
problem.’
